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Maidana says he’ll be the one facing Mayweather on May 3rd

By Chris Williams: In what could be a crushing blow to the career of Amir Khan, WBA welterweight champion Marcos Maidana (35-3, 31 KO’s) is saying that he’ll be the one facing Floyd Mayweather Jr. on May 3rd. Nothing has been confirmed or announced about this yet, but Maidana seems to think he’ll be the one in the ring with Mayweather.

“I’m waiting for the fight to be announced”, said via the Buenos Aires Herald. He further said that he’s “anxious and already training for the fight”.

Where this leaves Khan is unknown. He just spent the last 10 months of his career waiting on the Mayweather fight, and he even won a twitter poll that was created by Mayweather’s website. Now it looks like Khan will have nothing to show for his long wait and for the effort that he put out in getting his 1.4 million twitter supporters to get out and vote for him as the guy to face Mayweather on May 3rd.

For Mayweather, this is probably the only real decision he had at this time. There’s been some recent controversy surrounding Khan that took place in the UK, and Mayweather’s inclusion of Khan as potential opponent has led to a huge negative backlash from fans. These fans, mostly in the U.S, aren’t interested in seeing Mayweather beat up on a struggling fighter like Khan. Given how expensive pay-per-view fights are in America, these fans want to see someone that will at least be around for 12 rounds and will have a small chance of beating Mayweather. With Khan, he’s someone that is perceived by many fans as having too fragile of a chin to make it past 3 or 4 rounds against Mayweather under the best of circumstances.

In an ideal world, Mayweather will have Khan fighting someone on his undercard so that the British/Pakistani fighter can prove himself worthy to share the ring with Mayweather for later in 2014 or possibly in 2015. However, Golden Boy Promotions CEO Richard Schaefer has already said that there’s no truth about Khan fighting Adrien Broner on May 3rd. But even if it’s not Broner, it would still be interesting to see Khan fighting a guy like Devon Alexander or Shawn Porter.